I think this will be Activity 0.2 part 1 as I think I may be going off on a tangent. Or off on a tandem as my son used to say!
I have been thinking about participation and discussion today. Also about the judgments we may make about level of participation. I stumbled across James Clay’s blog http://elearningstuff.net
today and on it was a really interesting Guardian article from 2006 about the 1% rule. I’d not heard of it but is a bit like the 80/20 rule in the extreme. Anyway I got to thinking about whether it matters? Yes, for a community to work perhaps we should all contribute but is a learning community the same? If people (and then extend to our students) are seemingly passive with the material should we be concerned? Yesterday I would have said ‘yes’ and would definitely want full engagement with something I had worked hard to set up but today I am wondering about that. Also how can we tell? What measure of engagement ‘counts’? When do we make an issue of it?
Related to this (somehow) is a wonderful Radio 4 program Four Thought on Nancy Lublin self-confessed oldie of dosomething.org concerned with 21st Century social activism . Basically she says that at the poles there are a small proportion of presidents and unfortunately slackers. In the middle are lots of vice-presidents and followers. That’s just the way it is. An in-balance of presidents or slackers would both cause a problem but not to worry about VPs and followers – they just want to be part of something and actually you need this for projects to have a continued life. She refers to it as leading from the middle. Well worth a listen.
Link to original Guaridan piece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jul/20/guardianweeklytechnologysection2)
Link to iplayer:
Note to self – add learn how to embed links properly to to-do list!
